From «Moby-Dick» to «Finnegans Wake»: Essays in Close Reading- Edited by Janusz Semrau

ISBN-13: 9783631635926 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 241 str.

Fisiak, Jacek

Opis

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1979 and 2005. The book opens with two introductory sketches: a semi-theoretical one on intertextuality and a semi-historical one on the interaction of high and low literary forms. The gist of the book are textual analyses of the intricacies and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Herman Melville, Frank R. Stockton, Henry Adams, Thomas Pynchon, Gilbert Sorrentino, Donald Barthelme, Paul Auster, Flann O Brien, and James Joyce. While the essays lend themselves to being read in any order, as well as in isolation, the underlying Peircean-Joycean premise of the book is a semiotic-mythical commodius vicus of palimpsestic recirculation. Informed by a combination of poetic sensibility and disciplined as well as erudite mind, the ten essays collected here demonstrate that the agenda and methods of the more traditional close reading and the more contemporary intertextuality are not exclusive of each other."

Spis treści

Contents: Some remarks on intertextuality - Some remarks on the interaction of high and low literary forms - The whale and the rocket: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow - Elements of Puritanism in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow - The machine in Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton, and Thomas Pynchon - Auster, Emerson, Borges, Burton, and Melville's Scrivener - Donald Barthelme's Snow White and James Joyce's Finnegans wake - Finnegans wake and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father - Finnegans wake and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds - Finnegans wake in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and in Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan stew .

O autorze

Andrzej Kopcewicz (1934-2007) was the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. For over thirty years, he was head of the first department of American literature in Poland, at the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan. He has written a number of books.
Janusz Semrau teaches American literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the Academy of Management in Warsaw. He is the author of various publications.